dave

Not a big surprise really. Ron Paul did very well in the state of sin. A very libertarian state voting for a pretty libertarian guy. While he still doesn't have much of a shot at the nomination, it's nice to see that he's consistently grabbing a decent chunk of votes in each primary to get the point across to his party.

We're flattered. Huffington Post recently added the ability to search by company name for contributions. Only problem is that more then likely you'll run into a 30-60 sec wait for results over there when performing a search. Oh well, you could always use political base where it's instant. ;-).

The FEC released the 3rd quarter contribution data to the public Monday the 15th and we just got it all imported into Political Base last night. Now there's a lot to pour over, including some trends in contribution reporting that seems pretty weird as well as a new mess of celebrity data which you can see some highlights from below. The map below also shows our predictions on how the states will fall if money equaled votes. Like last quarter it looks like the Dems are way ahead of the GOP. Based on money alone, the Dems would win the general election in electoral votes by a landslide 375-163 score. Notable is that the GOP seems to have taken back Ohio.

If you're wondering why our totals may seem a little lower then a site like Open Secrets, it's because some politicians (Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Bill Richardson among others) are not reporting unitemized contributions in their data. In some cases, unitemized contributions (basically contributions not attributed to a source) can make up a large percentage of the total money a politician receives (up to 25% as reported for Barack Obama for example). Now there could be a very simple reason for why they report data this way, so there's no reason to be alarmed, but it's something we want to actively research before we decide what numbers we should show throughout the site for total money contributed. We're trying to talk with the FEC and the individual campaigns themselves to get the answer on why the campaigns report much higher summarized data then the sum of the individual contributions they release, but until then know that all the individual contributions from the 3rd quarter for the 2008 presidential campaign is now in the system and searchable. Have fun and feel free to grab a widget or two.

Presidential Fundraising by Party

Celebrities that recently contributed to campaigns

• Lynda Carter
• John Cleese
• Will Forte
• Louis Gossett Jr.
• Bette Midler
• Sean Penn
• Robin Wright-Penn
• Bob Saget
• Eriq La Salle
• Tony Shalhoub
• Will Smith

You can now adjust the Political Base home page to display blogs of your friends on the site within the main blog. By default, all of your friends will show up in the main blog, but you can click the link "Adjust which blogs show up here" to edit and remove certain blogs from the list. If there is someone's blog that you'd like to see on the homepage, you'll need to friend them first.

Also, we've added sorting abilities to the Money Search page so that you can now sort by name, recipient, date and amount.

We're constantly improving the site so if there's something specific you'd like to see added please let us know.

I bet she scores big with the male vote.

Say what you will about Ron Paul you can't say the dude doesn't have some fanatically creative supporters on the interwebs. Check out the following music vid for example. Must have taken a week or two to actually put together.

Name	Republican	Democrat
Lorne Michaels	$4,300	$23,050
Chevy Chase		$23,500
Jane Curtin		$8,100
Bill Murray		$3,000
Peter Aykroyd		$1,000
Dan Aykroyd		$4,600
Alan Zweibel		$1,000
Denny Dillion		$225
Eddie Murphy		$2,300
Gary Kroeger		$250
Julia Louis-Dreyfus		$2,600
Jim Belushi	$1,000	$3,000
Billy Crystal		$4,000
Christopher Guest		$9,300
Martin Short		$1,500
Joan Cusack		$4,375
Terry Sweeney		$500
Nora Dunn		$500
Victoria Jackson		$1,000
Phil Hartman		$1,000
Kevin Nealon		$1,000
Ben Stiller		$11,700
Chris Rock		$9,200
Adam Sandler	$2,100
David Spade		$2,000
Robert Smigel	1,000	$10,100
Jeneane Garofalo		$9,300
Horatio Sanz		$500

Drools. She want's me to register as a Republican though. I love me some Ron Paul, but actually registering as a Republican might be too much.

Ron Paul Girl - Register Now! - For more of the funniest videos, click here

There's nothing sweeter then watching two grown men fight on-stage. For some reason the on-screen "rival fight", a normal side-step in hollywood (think Leno and Letterman's avoidance), is a common event in the political talk-show realm. That said, Chris Matthews guest spot on Jon Stewart's Daily Show this Tuesday was no yawner. Stewart gave Matthews a scathing review of his new book, forcing Matthews to describe the appearance as "the worst interview of my life". Fair enough, it's not often ones writing is compared to Machiavelli's 16th century classic tale of selfishness The Prince. Stewart went on to call the advice in Matthews' new book Life's a Campaign a "recipe for sadness".

At this point you'd think conservative analysts would have gotten the point by now that sitting next to Stewart, whether on your show or his own, is just asking for trouble. But hey, a little tension is great for ratings, and likely book sales as well.